Paranatural

This is going to be a train wreck, is there a memory wiper? If not, then I can't see the light at the end of this tunnel, things are going to go off the rails.

>>87700171
>is there a memory wiper?

Even if there was, Johnny's gonna have to learn about this ghost stuff sooner or later, being possessed and all.

>>87700171
Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I see what you did there.

>>87700042
God damn it Zack WHY THE FUCK do you not just Finish up with what is happening with Max?
Really?! You piece of shit.

>>87700042
Wait so he can still see the ghost train even through a captured moment in time?

>>87700564
He seems surprised by this too.

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>Last night
WEW, I totally forgot

>>87700564
>even through a captured moment in time?
Implication is that spirits are photographable even with digital technology. At least, spectrals can "see what's really there"

I forgot Ed was a character. Did he mean omniscience?

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>>87700683
>Meanwhile, slightly more than two years ago...

>>87700748
Hey, we're making good time!

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>It's still an entertaining page
I have hope, boys.

>>87700739
>Did he mean omniscience?
zack the hack strikes back

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>>87700748
>When you realize that as the chapters get more complex, they're just going to keep building in cluttered contrivance.

Zack has a lot of neat ideas, but right now, he's muddling them. Your story has to be a symphony, not a cacophony.

He needs to learn pacing; for example, the Date between Zarei and (Name) really doesn't need to be in a chapter with a year long first act, and like 4 plot threads.

Also, this chapter started off with Ed's feelings of neglect and then focused on him a bit, before dropping him out of focus for like 70(?) pages.

If you weren't going to use Ed, his feelings should have merely been hinted at, and his story saved for later.

You're becoming Kubo, Zack

>>87700786
Just realized why I find Agent Day so damned cute: she looks like a fancy anthropomorphized Kirby.

>>87700564
Yep. The alt text reveals this as well if you weren't sure. A pretty neat idea.

>>87700963
not really. When you look at a picture on a phone it's just colored pixels on a screen. It should look the same to everyone, whether they have powers or not. It doesn't make any sense for someone with powers to somehow see a digital picture differently from someone else.

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>>87700314
>Johnny's gonna have to learn about this ghost stuff sooner or later, being possessed and all.

I love the idea of Johnny getting possessed, I really do. The idea of the toughest, most unpredictable kid in Mayview Middle School getting powers that are beyond his understanding would be one helluva ride.

The problem though with this: we NEVER see the worst of Normie!Johnny yet so far. We've only just been 5 days into the story. (>>87700683) The most intense + interesting action we see him do was chasing Max and Isaac in Chapter 3, but it felt so much like an establishing build-up. Him threatening Max in chapter 4? Nah, it got interrupted.

We never see his gang doing their jobs on people unrelated to Max. The rest was just mere threatening - all bark with no bite. Johnny's notoriety is just so implied all this time, and his increasingly passionate hunt for Team Lightningrod (C4-P48) might just be the ultimate villain moment we would really witness for many chapters...

...and then Forge decides to posses him too early.

>>87700818
>You're becoming Kubo, Zack
At least Kubo had some experience with story-making doing several one-shot mangas before his long-runners...Paranatural is practically Zack's first work, you'd think that he'd play a little bit safer than that.

>>87701134
The phone takes pictures of light spectrums that normal people can't see but it's still there.

>>87701137
I think Johnny won't start to manifest until a little later. It takes more than a day to start showing. At least a week hopefully.

>>87701212
>a week in-universe

can't wait to see this in 2025

>>87700314
As I recall possession only increases your chances of waking due to exposure to so much energy. It isn't a garanteed thing.

I could be remembering wrong and I am sure, in terms of the narrative [Z/H]ack can't stop himself from being a spectral anyway. So I guess it doesn't matter.

>>87701232
No. It's definitely a guaranteed thing. Being exposed to so much spectral energy will turn you into a spectral over time and having a spirit in your body is a fast track.

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ghost stuff on phones was covered previously btw

I dropped this when 14 years of hitball.
Worth picking back up?

>>87701262
Wait a little bit

>>87701262
No. It's gotten worse and worse. It was already bad by the time hitball came so if you like that then maybe come back.

>>87701262
It's getting better. There's another really long shitty part between then and now but it seems like it's getting better after that scene is over.

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Reminder that Suzy is a sexy, sexy little girl.

>>87701308
Zach don't you have a story to be writing?

>>87701308
>Girl

Sure anon, you keep believing that.

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>>87701308
She sure is

>>87701212
He already saw shades after Hitball though.

>>87700042
>omnipotence
>not omniscience
it's a great joke, but lessened by the details

>>87700585

He was confused by how they could see him, then he figured it out. He's been a spectral his whole life after all.

>>87701527
>it's a great joke
Is it though?

>>87701631
>Is it though?
It's Ed's wheelhouse of tangential conversational veering.

>>87701631
It definitely is. Just because the comic doesn't seem fun to you anymore doesn't mean there aren't funny jokes in it.

>>87701716
People using the default tools in flash disgust me.

>>87700042
Who's the blond guy? I think I've seen him talk 2 or 3 times. Is he a background character?

>>87701838
I think he's another cameo from another comic. I think the character's name is Noname Bottle-eyes, played by a young Jonathan Lipnicki.

>>87701715
Actually that is exactly what it would mean. If it didn't find most of the content either fun or funny it would stand to reason that the comic itself would appear fun or funny. You're just playing semantics and trying to make implications about my points sujectivity while ignoring the implications it would have on your own point.

>>87700042
>Good jokes
>Ed being Ed
>Johnny
>Colors are back
Is... Is Paranatural good again?

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>>87702072
No, it's just not as bad. The art is still extremely lazy, and how everything is set up is still a mess.

We'll see if it's good again once the chapter after this one is completed, 4 years from now.

>>87702072
No basically this:
>>87702129
Further it has lost a lot of the charm the first chapter was setting up. It's gone from quirky to out and out wacky. From sureal to fantastic. I was digging the quaint, lightly coloured wobbly lined adventures through a town where things are a bit odd. I am quickly losing patience for the fluro coloured, thick and rounded bi-weekly released gag comic about a cynic who walked into into a portal to anime-world and wacky faces.

I get you might feel differently if you haven't followed the comic for as long but by the time ghost train was in full swing it was as though everything nice about the comic was a lie.

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>>87702218
>I was digging the quaint, lightly colored wobbly lined adventures through a town where things are a bit odd. I am quickly losing patience for the fluro colored, thick and rounded bi-weekly released gag comic about a cynic who walked into into a portal to anime-world and wacky faces.

This basically encapsulates everything wrong. Zack made his biggest mistake when he went two updates a week, basically destroying the art, the characters, the backgrounds and the pacing.

I would've been perfectly fine with one page a week, In fact I believe we would've gotten further into the actual story. Zack would've had to actually use his brain to fit as much content into each page as possible without all the meandering bullshit in the way.

I have completely lost patience for his calarts-tumblr nightmare artstyle, This is an obligation to him now. It's no longer a labor of love like it was back in chapter 1-2-3.

>>87700818
Yeah, this problem started a while ago. We can barely move through the story because there are so many plot threads to address. They're never resolved, but he keeps adding more and the existing ones keep getting more complicated, like how last page Lisa inserted herself into Max's blackmail chain.

>>87700042
I have to say, I laughed a lot at panel 5.

>>87701259
>>87700042
How does this work btw? If you examined the bytes that made up the photo, would you see the ones that make up the train or not, or would they also depend on the observer. What if you took a hash of the image data? Would that also depend on the observer? If so, could you use it to create a paranormal cryptosystem? Lets say you took the hash of the image and used it as a symmetric encryption key. You could distribute the image with the ciphertext and only people who could see the ghost would be able to see the cleartext.

>>87702468
It would have been better if he used the right word >>87700739. Also I'm not sure even Ed could be that snarky under threat of physical violence. It's kind of a weird thing to say.

>>87700042
I'm glad we finally got a page where they just get to the point without several pages of jokes preceding it.

>>87702502
Uh, english please!

>>87702129
Who's the girl on the right supposed to be?

>>87703703
Suzy.

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>>87700683
>over two years
>the storyline hasn't even progressed a full twenty-four hours
webcomics were a mistake

>>87700818
>You're becoming Kubo, Zack
At least he hasn't gone Hussy yet.

>>87702502
That would probably only work with a technomancy spirit, and then would require no real computer knowledge

>>87700171
Why haven't you been deported yet, Carlos?

>>87703865
You'd think an animu shonenfag would know the dangers of lingering on Namek so long.

This seems to be a common problem with inexperienced authors of serializations.

>>87703703
>blonde
>pink
...Suzy?

>>87704044
Early Hussie was fine. Dead dad hussie is a low blow. Hussie was consistent and had decent pacing to this comparatively, even in dead dad mode. Zach is just, straight up, not very good a producing content.

>>87700748
woah look. Backgrounds!

>Knowing everything
>Omnipotence
>potence
HACK

>>87704823
>implying knowledge isn't power

But yeah, he is a complete hack. The joke was the same over dramatic response worldplay we've seen so much of lately anyway. It used to be a cool character thing but now it's just a world of quippers. It's like the comic is set in MCU

>>87704848
>it's just a world of quippers
I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates this style of writing.

>>87702072
>Colors are back
They're still just as washed out. But so far Paranatural has been pretty good for the past few weeks. I hope it stays this way.

>>87704823
Eh, I'm just going to pretend that it was intentional. Ed is trying to be clever, but he's not actually all that clever and got omnipotence and omniscience mixed up.

>>87706120
No it was meant to be a standard gag. Zach flubbed it.

>>87706177
I'm still going to pretend it was intentional.

>>87700042
Is that hoodie kid outright wearing one of those bodysuits? It certainly doesn't look like shadow, like it did before.

>>87702520
Ed isn't smart enough to know when he's being threatened by a bully and also I doubt Johnny could hurt Ed.

>strep throat
Are you kidding me. Why is he so sickly, is he on a meme diet like veganism that's making him waste?

>>87701134
Don't be autistic. Of all the things to complain you're choosing this very acceptable thing to bitch about.
We've seen the Paranatural Activity club monitorizing the ghosts of the school with regular cameras already.

>>87706234
Sachs probably forgot , or didn't care

>>87706353
No no. It's progressive. They are an it. Their gender and identity is intentionally ambiguous in some sort of wayward statement.

>>87702502
Real ghost detectors probably exist in this world. You could see paranatural things if you shift the image or filter it maybe
I think the cousinhood arent spectrals but use this instead.

>>87702520
Why should Ed be afraid of Johnny? He's fought things waaaaaay tougher than him. Ed's spectral powers won't affect him, but he still can enter the spirit world to flee or whatever.
(Also, can his painting powers affect the physical plane? Some pages seem to hint against it, but some do hint for it).

>>87701308
>T-club

>>87706392
But it used to be the whole inside of the hoodie was dark except for the eyes. It being that dark and the eyes being an exception is cartoon logic.

Here we can see contours the face and even ears. Why is it so dark when it's clearly not shadow, even by cartoon standards?

>>87706448
It's still cartoon standards.

>>87706448
Because, much like the comic, what had quaint beggings is so divorced from it's origins it has no meaning. While it might have been intended to be quaint and appealing initially, now it's a vehicle of something more.

>>87702289
The art had nothing to do with the schedule. Zack thinks this art is better. What changed the art is him switching to all digital from physical drawings inked and colored digitally.

And Zack absolutely would not have thought about speeding up the pace for a slower schedule.

>>87702502
It just captures the spectral spectrum of light as well as the visible spectrum.

>>87706525
>What changed the art is him switching to all digital
No. He went digital and deicded to experiment during the transition. He had some better digital styles than what we see now. What we see now is a result of the art friends he has made and their fucking awful input.

>>87706434
>he still can enter the spirit world to flee or whatever
That would definitely be a violation of secret protocol. He can probably get out of that situation with normal evasion. He's definitely fought harder things than a boy. I don't remember if his paint affected the physical world. I think it does since we've seen him hang clothes with it and Isabel's paper did effect the real world and was visible to the normal eye (word of Zack).

>>87706628
The problem is that Max could only see the Paranatural in the Paranatural Activity sign after he awoke as a spectral.

>>87707087
Everyone can see you going super fast in trance mode

>>87706628
That didn't stop Ed from doing espectral turbo push ups in plain sight of his class, and his classmates weren't unaware of this.

>>87706525
Most webcomickers are bad about this.
They don't take their rate of output into consideration at all. Newbie comic artists in the 40's had better sense: you had one page monthlies for damned good art and multipage stories for the less solid stuff.

RJ looks so fucking stupid now

>>87706628
Those clothes were possessed and his paint isn't visible hence why only spectrals can see the "paranatural" on the activity club door.

>>87700748
>tfw this is actually a good page.

People constantly complain about how long a single day takes. Do you think the pacing wouldn't be as bad if the entire story will only be a week or two?

>>87700748
>Max has known every character in the comic with the exception of his family for less than a week

>>87700042
Wait a second...
>>87700748
So you're telling me that in the two years it took to get to this point, it's been only about a day or so in the comic.
I've just started reading, I'm not even at the train yet. I think it's time to give up.

>>87709388
>only spectrals can see the "paranatural" on the activity club door.
Totally forgot about that.

>>87710730
The entire story will be about one year Zack has said. But that was years ago he said that.

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Why wasn't Zarei lezzing out in this scene? Is it because Hack hadn't character assassinated her yet?

>>87702129
>that pic
>shipping the girl who dresses like a boy with the boy who dresses like a girl
I didn't know I wanted this.

>>87712769
He was probably single at this point.